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YNAB moving to a subscription model
dr_andus:
I think the largest part of the problem with trying that is going to be granularity. Every dollar has a name is one of the tenets of the financial strategy. What's the equivalent of a dollar?
-wraith808 (January 08, 2016, 12:31 PM)
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You could also do the same with your personal time. Just think of it as an inventory item, with an expiration date, associated cost, and sell price and you're on your way.
All that's important is that you understand your unit(s) of measure and consistently apply them. AFter that, budgeting and determining whether you're "gaining" or "losing" becomes relatively easy to do.
Now here's an extra credit exercise: How could the above concepts be applied to personal time management when not thinking solely in terms of financial opportunity and cost? Why would it be worth it for you to start thinking of it that way? How would you do it if you decided to? 8)
-40hz (January 08, 2016, 02:06 PM)
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Yes, I am thinking of it in terms of personal productivity, which I have been tracking for some time, to understand patterns.
One thing I did figure out is that the "unit" is a very complicated thing. What needs to be budgeted is not just time but a unit of "attention" or "concentration" (some kind of mental energy, though it depends on physical energy as well), which is not equally distributed across time.
My ability to concentrate and produce high quality work solving difficult problems is the highest on Monday morning, then it drops after lunch, might go up a bit in the late afternoon, and then goes down in the early evening. And this resource gradually depletes across the week. So it might take 2 or 3x as much time on a Friday to to produce the same quality of work as with 1 hr of Monday morning time (if at all possible).
So it doesn't matter what my hourly rate is, the fact is that the opportunity cost of Monday 9-12 might we worth the entire Friday.
One system I was trying to devise for this was to use different sized post-it notes to plan my daily tasks, to represent the diminishing value of hours in a day. The 9-10 or 10-11 post-it note would be the biggest, and then the others get gradually smaller. If you consider lunch and other breaks, we might be talking about 4 or 5 pieces of paper (the largest ones may represent bigger chunks of time, such as 60 min or 90 min).
The point of this is to remind myself that difficult and high value tasks should be done in the morning, and that I shouldn't even think of putting those on the smaller notes in late afternoon, as it's unlikely I'd have enough mental energy to finish the task or produce good quality work.
These different-sized pieces of paper then represent a kind of a depreciating financial instrument of different values. They represent different values in terms of possible return on investment and opportunity cost, if I waste them (don't convert them into a valuable output) or plan the wrong type of activity.
So I can take these "bills" and invest them into activities. I guess one could try to put a financial value on these notes, to express the different opportunity costs.
I have tried to re-create this electronically by using Gingko app's virtual index cards, but as they are all the same size, it didn't quite work.
Using two Google Calendars (budget and actual) could be one way to try to combine the above ideas with the YNAB method. One could plan out the day and week in the "budget calendar" and share those events with the "actual calendar," and then move the events in the actual calendar to the times (and durations) and dates when they had actually got done (if ever). At the end of the month (or at any moment, really) one could view both budget and actual side-by-side, and learn from it. "Not completed" tasks would need to roll over into the new month.
So a custom-made software would allow one to assign the higher monetary value to certain blocks of time, and then drop those blocks onto the budget calendar and assign specific tasks to invest those blocks in. Then the actual calendar could allow one to record how that investment was actually spent, and record the estimated value of the output (i.e. whether the unit of concentration was spent fruitfully). Perhaps total outputs and wasted effort could be somehow calculated at the end of each day, week, and month, and perhaps even monitor them as the day is progressing.
There would be a lot of advantages to do this in Google Calendar, so the ideal solution would be some kind of a browser extension or plug-in that could overlay the exta features.
The point of it all would be to get better at budgeting time and mental effort, to achieve maximum productivity with highest quality outputs. This of course also means that time for rest, exercise, or less demanding work would also need to be allocated appropriately.
I still haven't read up on YNAB though, so would need to do that first to see how all this could be related to it.
Deozaan:
In general, they have to renegotiate to get your business... whether that's just a we're doing this, do you want to continue to use your account, rather than it being automatic. My bank just merged with another bank. And we had to OK our accounts being a part of the merger.-wraith808 (January 07, 2016, 10:00 PM)
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I've had two bank accounts from separate banks which got bought out by other banks. One just after the big banking bailout in 2008 or so. The other just a couple of years ago.
In both cases my accounts transferred over. I never had to renegotiate anything. From my point of view, pretty much everything just worked the way it worked before the buyout. I just got sent new debit cards with the new bank's name/logo on them.
But maybe that's down to a difference between a buyout and a merger. (Though IMO that seems to be two words to describe the same thing.)
One thing I don't quite understand though is that if YNAB4 is working fine and might work fine for years to come, why are so many die-hard YNAB4 fans (like Macdrifter I linked to or the above open source developers) looking for alternatives already?
-dr_andus (January 07, 2016, 05:15 PM)
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I think 40hz explained this pretty well. But I think another part of it is that for people who have used and loved YNAB, they've heartily recommended it to family and friends. But now they can no longer do that so they're looking for something else that they can recommend. It won't be long before we can no longer say "I recommend YNAB 4" because YNAB 4 will no longer be available to new customers. Sure, I can keep using it for the foreseeable future because I already own it. But I suspect they'll stop selling new license keys to YNAB 4 within the next few months.
40hz:
Yes, I am thinking of it in terms of personal productivity, which I have been tracking for some time, to understand patterns.
One thing I did figure out is that the "unit" is a very complicated thing. What needs to be budgeted is not just time but a unit of "attention" or "concentration" (some kind of mental energy, though it depends on physical energy as well), which is not equally distributed across time.
My ability to concentrate and produce high quality work solving difficult problems is the highest on Monday morning, then it drops after lunch, might go up a bit in the late afternoon, and then goes down in the early evening. And this resource gradually depletes across the week. So it might take 2 or 3x as much time on a Friday to to produce the same quality of work as with 1 hr of Monday morning time (if at all possible).
-dr_andus (January 08, 2016, 05:15 PM)
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Yeah. Your individual productivity/attention/energy curve seems somewhat similar to a seasonal business cycle with it's slow and busy periods. We always followed that and scheduled things like training and enrichment activities - or vacations - whenever possible during slow months.
On a daily basis it's even more important to be aware of your own personal cycles and get a handle on them.
I'm like you. I'm most productive between 5:00AM and 1:00PM. Afternoons are generally not a good time for me. I'm usually sagging between 2:00 and 7:00PM. I'll get an upswing around 9:00PM however. That's my best time for creative things like music composition, long-range/strategic planning, non-technical writing, or graphic design. And as long as I don't break momentum on something, I can easily go from 9:00PM into the wee hours of morning if I'm fully engaged. I need to balance that out against my morning schedule's requirements. But as of now, I can get away with less sleep than I'd like (or should get) for about two or three days in a row before it becomes a real problem for me. It's still something I try to avoid. But it's also nice to know I can do it if I need to without suffering too much of a physical or mental backlash as long as I don't make a habit of it.
So yes. Cycles definitely need to be taken into consideration because some hours are more "golden" than others.
(@dr_andus: Have you experimented at all with blind testing biorhythm charts against yourself? I've tried it and the results were mixed as far as their accuracy and usefulness is concerned. I definitely think there's a chance there might be something to it. But not in the simplistic form it presently has.)
dr_andus:
And as long as I don't break momentum on something, I can easily go from 9:00PM into the wee hours of morning if I'm fully engaged.
But as of now, I can get away with less sleep than I'd like (or should get) for about two or three days in a row before it becomes a real problem for me. It's still something I try to avoid.
-40hz (January 08, 2016, 09:09 PM)
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I used to do that until I reached a point in my life where I realised (partly through tracking my daily "pure productive hours," (i.e. not including any breaks), and quantity and quality of outputs, as well as writing a diary at the end of the day) that if I skip gym (or some sort of exercise) at 6pm and carry on working, or work on the weekend, I'm borrowing productive effort from the next day and the next week (and from my sleep and rest time), and I'm no better off, in fact much worse off, as it quickly leads to burnout.
So I only engage in that kind of overtime work right before some mega project's final deadline, which is fine, as after that I can take a week off to recover, if necessary.
(@dr_andus: Have you experimented at all with blind testing biorhythm charts against yourself?
-40hz (January 08, 2016, 09:09 PM)
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No, how do you do that?
dr_andus:
I finally managed to install and play around with YNAB 4, and I like it a lot so far, it makes a lot of sense, so I think I'll bite the bullet and buy a licence for it. Thanks all for the recommendation.
The only thing I didn't like was that it doesn't seem possible to scale up the app on a 1920 x 1080 14" monitor, and the text and numbers look quite small and washed out. On the plus side, 6 months worth of budgets fit on the screen.
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